Amazon allows customers to lend certain Kindle books for 14 days at a time, …

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Amazon now allows Kindle users to lend certain books to other Kindle users, but it seems the company doesn't actually want people to use that service. Amazon has cut off API access from lending service Lendle, which allowed Kindle users to list the lendable books they had purchased for perusal by other users. And because Lendle doesn't offer any other services, the owners have taken it offline until further notice.

Lendle users found it a nearly essential service for those looking to lend and borrow their purchased Kindle books. The service worked like this: once you made an account at Lendle, you could sync up with your Amazon account so that all of your purchased books were shown. Via the API, Lendle could figure out which books were lendable or not (Amazon leaves this decision up to the publishers, and users can only lend a book for 14 days to other users).

Lendle then listed books available for borrowing from other members. If you saw something you were curious about, you could request to borrow it—users had the ability to authorize each request before the book was lended. Lendle didn't operate outside of Amazon's system, didn't circumvent any kind of DRM or restrictions, and didn't even charge for the service—there were no ads on the site and, in fact, each book listing on Lendle also sported a link to purchase it on Amazon.

According to Lendle cofounder Jeff Croft, Amazon revoked Lendle's API access on Monday, flatly stating from a no-reply e-mail address that Lendle does not "serve the principal purpose of driving sales of products and services on the Amazon site." Croft and the Lendle team take issue with this, arguing that the entire purpose of Lendle is to encourage people to buy books via lending.

"As a published author, it was very important to me personally to build the system in a way that was good for authors and publishers," Croft wrote. "Our site requires that you be willing to lend books before you can borrow them. We even went so far as to allow users to sync their Lendle accounts with their Kindle accounts, so that we could ensure anyone who borrows books on Lendle has previously purchased lendable books from Amazon. Our philosophy is: You can’t borrow if you don’t lend, and you can’t lend if you don’t buy."

Lendle isn't the only Kindle lending service available online—BookLending is another semi-popular option that has sprung up in recent weeks—but Lendle is (so far) the only one to publicly talk about Amazon's letter. Croft told CNET that he's already been in touch with at least two other services who got the same message, though those sites have yet to take any action. "They may not be reacting as fast as us, or they may be a bit more defiant," he said. (Update: BookLending has informed us that its Amazon API access remains uninterrupted.)

Why is Amazon revoking API access to services that only help users make use of a feature that Amazon itself provides? We asked Amazon, but the company hasn't responded to our request for comment. Amazon only added the lending feature in late 2010 after years of the Kindle store being online, and even now, it's not exactly a highly advertised feature. As evidenced by the strict lending terms, it's likely that most publishers aren't thrilled at the prospect of their e-book files being transferred around to users who didn't pay for them.

From the consumer perspective, it looks like Amazon only added book lending so that it could have better feature parity with the competition (*cough* Nook), and now it's taking early steps to ensure that the activity remains a niche interest instead of a major Kindle feature.

Update 2: Lendle is back online and says that Amazon has restored its API access after the two parties agreed that Lendle would disable the BookSync tool.

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Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui